Cloanto

Cloanto is an Italian software company, run by Mike Battilana, best known for keeping the Commodore and Amiga platforms legally alive long after Commodore itself was gone. Through its Amiga Forever (first released 1997) and C64 Forever packages, Cloanto distributes the original system ROMs — the Amiga’s Kickstart and Workbench, the C64’s KERNAL and BASIC — bundled with emulators and games, under proper licence.

For anyone learning to write code for these machines today, Cloanto is the quiet answer to an awkward question: where do I legally get the ROMs?

📘 They were an Amiga software house first, and that is the part usually left out. Cloanto shipped commercial Amiga applications through the platform’s commercial life — Amazing Computing reviewed Personal Write in February 1992, “produced by Cloanto Italia and distributed by Centaur Software”, list price under $50, and the Personal Paint line ran for years alongside it. They are not a rights-holding vehicle that appeared after the fact; they are a developer who stayed in the room after everyone else left, which is a large part of how the rights ended up with them.

Fast facts

• Run by: Mike Battilana
• Country: Italy
• Founded: 1987 (Italy); Cloanto Corporation incorporated in Nevada in 1998
• Known for: Amiga Forever (1997), C64 Forever
• Owns: the classic Commodore/Amiga ROM and OS copyrights (consolidated into Amiga Corporation, 2019)

Why a company owns 40-year-old ROMs

When Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, its intellectual property scattered through a long chain of buyers, and the trademarks and the software copyrights drifted apart — changing hands separately over the decades. Cloanto, already the licensed distributor of the Amiga ROMs since the 1990s, consolidated the classic copyrights — covering Commodore/Amiga works up to the early 1990s — into Amiga Corporation (a Battilana entity) in 2019.

⚠ That ownership has been litigated, and it is worth being precise about what was decided. In June 2025 the US Ninth Circuit issued an unpublished, non-precedential memorandum in Cloanto v. Hyperion. It accepted, for the purposes of that case, that Cloanto owned the copyrights alleged to be infringed, reversed the dismissal of the copyright claims, and sent them back to be decided. It did not rule on infringement and did not settle the ownership of every Commodore and Amiga right. A court holding that a party has standing to sue is a long way from a court holding that the party wins.

The upshot: those system ROMs are still owned, still licensed, and still sold — they are not free for the taking, however old they are.

Preservation, not lock-up

Cloanto’s role sits in tension with the abandonware culture that grew up around old software. Where abandonware treats forgotten code as fair game, Cloanto’s model is licensed preservation: pay a few pounds, get the genuine ROMs, legally. It is closer to licenseware than to the free-for-all — the platforms stay available, but on the rights-holder’s terms.

Why it matters here

The ROMs that boot a Commodore machine are not Cloanto’s to give away for free, and they are not ours either. That is why this curriculum is free but its ROMs are bring-your-own: buy them once through C64 Forever or Amiga Forever, or use open replacements where they exist. Dumping the ROM from a machine you own is the other common route, though whether that is permitted depends on where you live and on what you bought — owning the hardware is not the same as owning a licence to copy its firmware, and backup-copy exceptions differ by country.

Cloanto’s reach covers the machine’s ROMs, not the third-party tools built on top — the AMOS and Blitz Basic language systems have their own, separate owners.

See also

• Commodore — the company whose work Cloanto preserves
• Acid Software — Blitz Basic, separately owned
• Abandonware — the culture Cloanto’s model contrasts with
• Licenseware — the closer cousin to Cloanto’s approach